Texas to the Bone: Six Generations of Recipes from the Family of Ada Magnolia Talley & Napoleon Bonaparte 'Pole' Hemphill of Red Rock, Texas

Find more than 275 recipes, family photos, and lots of stories and cooking tips from six generations of my family, from 2-year-old Jacy to those from Aunt Clara, who cooked more than 67 years (for the same man!!).

Hello, Lyn! Thank you for letting me know the cookbook isn't available on Amazon at the moment. I made an edit a few weeks ago and thought it was back on track. It is now. If I can believe the CreateSpace website, it should appear in a product search in the next few days.

Lulu sales have been just fine. I prefer working with Lulu MUCH more than with Amazon / CreateSpace. It took over a year for CreateSpace to get the red part of my cover actually red. Got really ugly. First they insisted on making it orange and then they went to pink. They don't use Pantone colors so it's hard to get the right color and they just did not want to see red . . . until I let them know that that was EXACTLY what I was seeing, in more ways than one

And now I'm finding the book's been 'unavailable' for the last several weeks on Amazon. I also discovered today that they show no sales / royalties due in spite of the fact they send me an email every time a book sells. That makes me think there's another round of hassle with them in my near future. If you're interested in publishing, I highly recommend Lulu over Amazon / Create Space.

I've sold almost 200 copies of the cookbook but that was mostly to family and friends, which was expected, since it's a family-oriented cookbook. I did most of the sales myself, in person. I bought many copies of it and put it in local stores, sold it as a vendor at farmers' markets and arts/crafts fairs in the area, and at local community functions, including my family reunion. My co-author/cousin sells them at her horse ranch.

I haven't really made much effort to market it to a larger audience but I will do so soon. I'm building a food-based website now and will put it on the website. I'm also working up more cookbooks, too. I have a series of cookbooks in mind and have been collecting recipes for them. Time to get them in print!

What a fine achievement! For someone like me who is very interested in geneaolgy AND cooking not to leave out the eating and dishwashing I suppose! I was most interested to read all about it and your family history. The photos are really nice too.

I could not pick it up on Lulu who said they could not find your product, but I did get it on Amazon with a picture and all and was able to skim through to the last bone!

Fantastic and I wish you all the success and much strength to your elbow as I often hear said.

Ah, Lestie, you sound like me - why is it that having fun in the kitchen has to come with so many dirty dishes??

Thanks for the heads-up about not finding the book on Lulu. I was there just a little while ago and the book came up without any problems. I'll certainly check back into the situation there.

And thank you for the kind words!! I really got interested in family history when I worked on this book. In fact, I started adding individual family histories because I didn't think we were getting enough recipes to accurately call it a 'book' so the geneaolgy started out as filler so there'd be more pages. Working with the book, I found a cousin in another state who has started coming to our family reunions every year and I use Facebook to keep in touch with her almost every day - what a wonderful bonus!

For my own personal treasure, I've been carrying around a hard copy and pens with me whenever I'm headed to a family gathering / reunion. I pass around the book and the pen and ask everyone to sign a page that has their name, photo, or recipe on it. It's becoming one of my most treasured keepsakes. This past Christmas, my youngest nieces and nephew (ages 4 to 8) had a grand time taking the cookbook around to everybody for their autographs. I've even got their signatures, too. I'm really looking forward to showing it to them again when they've got little ones of their own.

Thanks again for your encouragement, Lestie and Lyn! You've made my day!

P.S. Sandy ... I am thinking of copying you! Is that allowed? Smiling as I write that. I come from a family that is counted amongst the 1820 Settlers to this country (South Africa) and we can trace our family line back to 1679 in the UK. I doubt that I would get many recipes or cooking and life tips going back that far, but I have the diary written around about that time (1830 or so) which is a fascinating story of life as she was lived then in SA. Some very brave people did some very fine things in the name of family and travel and farming and homemaking. Just reading this makes me feel that they were trail blazers for sure, brave and courageous, adventurous and disciplined. Humble, devout, giving and generous too and made much of whatever they had be it natural materials, food or transport. If I have inherited any of those traits, then I am surely the lucky one.

Anyway, must ask you a question for interests's sake - were you able to try out the recipes or were there too many? Are you thinking of reprinting it in time with updates and more as the family gets to know about it?

End off on a curious note and say thanks and congrats again, a really fine job you did for your family.

P.S. What a fine idea to have as many sign their names. Indeed a treasure.

Your family history sounds fascinating, Lestie. By all means, go for it! I'd love to buy a copy of your cookbook and family history.

A wonderful resource for me was Ancestry.com, where records from all over the world are available online. I paid about $13 each month for a month or two while I was getting all the details straight. When I'd look up a birth or marriage record of someone, I'd get more info from the website within a couple of days that took me to links of other vital records and other family members working up a family tree. The website allowed me to contact people I'd never even heard of before and I found I've got a distant cousin with exactly the same name as my own. It was a wonderful resource! They have birth, death, marriage, divorce, military, school, census records, photos - more! - for people all around the world.

Ancestry.com's even got a TV show here in the US now - Who Do You Think You Are? - where they answer a family history question of celebrities and walk them through the steps of finding out the answer to the mystery. The first episode had Sarah Jessica Parker asking if it was true she had a relative convicted in the 1600s of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts (she did). On another episode, the football player, Emmitt Smith, wanted to know if he had direct connections to Africa; they took him to the very dock (in Gambia, I think?) where his ancestors boarded a ship to the US. That episode moved me to tears. I really enjoy that show, probably all the more so because of the work I had just done on my cookbook!

I went to a website called iStock.com to find / buy the photos I used for front and back covers. I think I spent about $40 total for them but you could use something you've already got and it would be wonderful - such as that diary you mentioned?

Did I try all the recipes? No. The recipes I contributed to the book were all recipes I've used many times before (I used to be a professional chef) and I added stories, cooking tips, serving suggestions, and that kind of thing to many of them. Many of the others I've eaten before because they've been in my immediate family for years and somebody usually cooks them for family gatherings. Other recipes, from more distant relatives, are something I might have had at a family reunion (we do this once a year) or that I know is a tried-and-true recipe because the person who contributed it took pride in serving it to their immediate family, many of whom also contributed recipes. Even though I haven't cooked them all, I do vouch for every one of them.

Funny thing - this cookbook was published in 2010. Since then, people bring their dishes to the family reunions labeled with the dish's name and page number in the cookbook! Before the cookbook, nobody labeled anything. LOL!!

Updates? I don't plan on an update any time soon. In fact, I've said there won't be an update until the 7th generation is ready to write it (as is, the cookbook covers 6 generations and the sixth generation has only just begun). Recipes are hard to type and the project took much longer than I'd anticipated. For an example of what I was working with, look for "Grandma Verna's Biscuits" on the page numbered 194. I had lots of those to translate. So glad I thought to scan and publish a copy of at least one of them.

I do offer you my very highest encouragement in writing a similar book for your family. If I can be of help in any way, please let me know!!

What an exciting project and a job well done, Sandy. Congratulations on all the hard work and best wishes for success.

Lestie, you have got me to thinking about giving it a go, too. It will have to wait though till I get some other books finished, which I have been putting off. But, a book of the recipes the Granny Women used for healing would be a fun project for sure.

Here's a lesson I learned from my first go at it - don't wait until you've gathered dozens of recipes to start typing. I did that and was overwhelmed by it all. I've got more cookbooks in the works but I'm working them up as I create / discover a recipe that I want to add to a particular book. It's not nearly as daunting a job when working with only one recipe at a time.

I also discovered that everybody writes recipes differently. I think a streamlined translation is the key to a good cookbook. What does that mean? Tablespoon, tablespoon, T, Tspoon, Tbl, tbl, tbl spn, Tbl spoon all mean add a tablespoon of whatever the ingredient. Set your format and use it as you enter each recipe; it's much easier than going back to edit all the many ways different cooks write recipes.

Also, some of the recipes came to me with a list of ingredients and instructions in paragraph form. Some of them came as paragraphs with ingredients scattered throughout. Others were simply lists of ingredients. Even more maddening, some of them came as a short list of ingredients but other ingredients were listed within the paragraph(s) of instruction (thanks, Mom!). My personal preference is for a complete list of all ingredients in the recipe followed by instructions in paragraph form so that's how my recipes read.

When I saw the many different recipe styles I had to work with, I looked through my favorite cookbooks and found the format / style of one that I really liked and used that as my style guide.